Premonitory Shivers

“Though we say that we cannot read the future, its conditions lie all around us.  They are as if encrypted.  We cannot read them because we lack the key (which will be in our hands only when it is too late to use it).  But we see their coded fragments and must call them something.  Many aspects of our own contemporary culture might be called premonitory shivers: panicky renderings of unreadable messages about the kind of society we are creating.  Our dominating passion, after all, is to give life meaning, even if sometimes a hideous one.”

This passage comes from the first page of historian of China Philip A. Kuhn’s “Soulstealers,” and let me quote the blurb to emphasize how odd it is:

 Midway through the reign of the Ch’ien-lung emperor, Hungli, in the most prosperous period of China’s last imperial dynasty, mass hysteria broke out among the common people. It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men’s queues (the braids worn by royal decree), and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of soulstealers that ensued, Philip Kuhn provides an intimate glimpse into the world of eighteenth-century China.

Kuhn’s book is about witchhunts, beliefs, and perhaps most fundamentally the mechanisms of the imperial bureaucracy.  This quote sounds like something a beautiful female mathematician will tell a sex-starved soldier in a Thomas Pynchon book.  (Seriously, if I felt like it and I had my copy of Against the Day handy, I would give you some page numbers, because this is like totally what his new book is about.  Premonitory shivers.  Damn.)

What’s so bizarre — and also sort of great — about this quote is how ahistorical it is.  I’m not denying that it is in some sense a really brilliantly written passage, because it is, or even that I find it meaningful in one way or another, although I tend to feel that it’s more conceptually interesting (and that I’m prone to getting suckered in by that sort of stuff) than a truly profound insight into sociocultural phenomena.  To tell the whole truth, I’m not even 100% sure what it really means.  Truth value aside, it’s just not the sort of thing you expect to see in an academic history book, and further, if I were trying to summarize Kuhn for you, I don’t think I’d get into this conceptual basis at all.  I mean, at gunpoint I could come up with a reading of the book as based in the idea of “premonitory shivers,” but it isn’t the most obvious one, or even one of the most essential.  (Of course, I could just be a moron.)

Still, before I sell the book back to the college bookstore, I want to wonder for a moment what sorts of “panicky renderings of unreadable messages” we’re shivering out into the tangled cultural morass we can never fully unlock.   And seriously, represent for “Against the Day,” kids.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Few things reliably make me as happy as a book that feels genuinely custom-made, as if it were specifically tailored to my interests.  I’m pretty sure that when Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) sat down to write The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, he was attuned to some special frequency broadcasted from my head and my head alone.  (If this book doesn’t turn out so well, I’m going to have to pick up a tinfoil hat to preempt further disappointment.)  It’s like he said, “Well, what does Zack like?” Hardboiled dialogue.  Jewy stuff.  Jewy hardboiled stuff.  Oh My God this is perfect.  And then he said, “Well, now I’m just going to throw other things Zack likes in there for the hell of it.”  Hence, Alaska.  I’m going to quote the Amazon.com review from Publishers Weekly (which actually ends up critical, although for reasons I probably won’t share), a work of art on its own terms, and then get back to reading it, because I have rediscovered happiness.

They are the “frozen Chosen,” two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon’s ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it’s no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.  The novel begins—the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America—with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt’s plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book’s timeless refrain: “It’s a strange time to be a Jew.” Into this world arrives Chabon’s Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon’s “Alyeska” is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Yes!